Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it?  That's because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced.

You cannot fully understand a person's need until you have endured the same need. As hard as you may try to predict and comprehend their situation and suffering, I guarantee you'll fall short until you've been there.

Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements.

The Divine has created this moment in time. It is a very powerful moment, where there is only one way and that way is that you completely let go. Completely let go of what is known, what is safe, and move into the space of beauty.

only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.

You cannot have qualifications without experience; and you cannot have experience without personal interest and bias. That may not be an ideal arrangement; but it is the way the world is built and we must make the best of it. p 242

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

He stood at the window of the empty cafe and watched the activites in the square and he said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they'd have no heart to start at all.

Other candidates may say they have 10 years of real-world experience, but I say, What, did they work nonstop with no sleep for a decade? If that’s the case, then I am an expert sleeper with a decade of surreal-world experience.

If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.

You don't learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you're not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.

I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.

Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.

Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.

So there are countless reasons to remain on this Godforsaken planet that was long considered the only world, if for no other reason than to learn the end of our story: what the author of our lives has not yet taken the trouble to finish.